writing on the wall
I’ve been slacking with my blog posts recently, though I have a good excuse of being really busy at school. This is the last week for my learning support students; they take their standardized grammar test next week, and today I’ll see how many of them passed their final written exam. I have a lot of thoughts about this semester: teaching to this particular population of student, teaching grammar, creative writing. Despite how much I was fed this hyper-ideal pedagogical ache with caring composition teaching style in graduate school, nothing I learned prepared me for students who are simply not prepared (in primary schooling) to be in college. In fact, all of the new composition theory presupposes students coming into college who are able to write complete sentences, who can read. Students who somehow went to high schools that escaped the No Child Left Behind requirements or entered high schools as readers and writers. Almost all of my students were about 11 years old when George W. entered office with all of his great ideas for education reform.
My naive ideas have really been slapped into place this semester. Now when I go and retrieve my student’s final essays, I’ll be so happy if most of my students were able to utilize complete sentences in their essays. Honestly. I’ll be really thrilled if they wrote thesis statements and correctly spelled most of the words. I really have so much respect for the people who work almost wholly with these students. I don’t know if I could do it again.
Next semester I’m teaching six classes, though no learning support. I can’t believe that I somehow feel relieved.
Anyway, it’s warm here, though very lovely and very fally. It is in the mid 60s and should stay here for the next few days. I’ve never experienced this, though it’s quite nice. Now that the weather has moved past the burning, it’s very pleasant. I’m going to try to get some random pictures up later.
thanksgiving light and dark
I hope everyone has a safe and fun Thanksgiving–and of course, a stress free day of travel, if that is even possible anymore.
breathe me
Tonight I am making some mixes for the fabulous Kelly B and I was putting on the song “breathe me” by Sia and trying to think about how to explain it. And it occurred to me that while the song is gorgeous, I think that most people that love it love it because it accompanied probably one of the best final six minutes of any television show: Six Feet Under. So, obviously, that inspired me to find it on YouTube and post it.
I guess if you’ve never seen the show, none of it will make sense, apart from the fact that rather than neatly tying up the show, they go forward through the song, into the future, and show how each character will live AND die. It’s such a great ending. If it weren’t for all of the new great shows that the characters are own now: Dexter, Brothers & Sisters, Dirty Sexy Money, I’d really be sad posting this. But I’m not. Life goes on.
color and drought
I’ve been uploading pictures on flickr today and have been noticing that behind the really beautiful fall colors that are still swinging around on the trees there is the terribly sad dead grass. Anyway, the photograph with the single leaf shows you what it looks like. That is grass. It’s been that color for about a month now.
the downside of social networking
Today I finally changed my relationship status to “single” on Facebook, which I have been dreading since the breakup. I’ve heard the stories about what happens to the mini feed. On CNN they even covered a story about a college girl who didn’t know she had been broken up with until she saw it on facebook. The whole thing is just awful and may be a reason why people stay in relationships longer than they are suited too, to avoid a website declaring your singledom.
I did it anyway. When I got back to my profile, I saw, to my horror, the mini-feed with “Jessica is single” and a little broken heart next to it. I would have preferred “another one bites the dust” or “another step toward twenty cats.”
And I think they could have thought of something more original than the broken heart. Like a little ugly woman with a leg missing or a chair on fire or an empty bottle of bourbon or a single chopstick trying to spear a piece of sushi or a lonely meatball rolling off a mountain.
Now those would be more accurate. So it goes.
josh keyes
Josh Keyes is my new New York style pizza. And anyone who knows me knows I would never ever make this statement without meaning it.
He does “… drawings and paintings that depict animals isolated in fragments of their natural environment, overrun with shards of man-made artifice and debris.”
Surreal, a little unnerving, and at times very tender. Lots of good stuff to see in here.
quick, to the stolen exercise equipment mobile
This morning, I went to workout at the apartment complex gym, just the same as almost every other morning. Me and another girl (I don’t know her name) are the only ones who are currently using the gym because the lock on the door has broken and the ass. man (assistant manager—she really writes that under her name in official apartment communications) won’t fix it for some reason. So, like any other reasonable gym-goer, we’ve been climbing through the window.
It didn’t occur to me until today how suspicious that might look. Not being a seasoned criminal, I never thought anyone would suspect anything at all. But today, just as I was getting started, the ass. man dashed in with her key and looked startled. Apparently someone saw “someone” trying to break into the gym and steal “stuff”. I just shrugged my shoulders.
Really?—whoever you are that called that in–Really? Do you really think I was going to carry out the 3,000 pound treadmill or elliptical strapped to my back, toss it into my Jetta, and zoom off into the criminal sunrise? And anyway, the treadmill wasn’t working today. It wouldn’t go above 3.5 mph, so I wouldn’t want it anyway. After an hour that’s a calorie-burned equivalent of like 6 corn flakes.
In other exciting news, I’m on my second day of finals for my learning support students. Where did this semester go? I’ve been so busy figuring it all out that it just swept by, I guess. This weekend, in addition to Thanksgiving shopping—for my first Thanksgiving alone—I’m going to be writing my Lit. final exam. I’m going with ids this year.
The weather got warmer again yesterday. Mid 70s actually. But today it seems to have cooled off. It rained a bit last night (on account of S. Purdue’s praying) and so now there is a lovely breeze coming into the apartment. I’ll try to post a picture of the fall colors here soon. The trees have finally fully turned and are really brilliant on my way up north every day.
…one whose drouth/ Yet scarce allay’d, still eyes the current streame
John Milton wrote that. People have prayed for rain for thousands of years. In fact, while writing my dust runner poems, I spent countless hours researching the rain prayers for this poem:
Why the Dust Keeps Coming
Because you have no taro leaves
to pour over the bones,
and no cave for hiding them.
What use for rain
charms when children
drop dead from hunger
in the fields? Or men
from whiskey around fires?
Or women, mouths filled
with a thousand spider eggs
of loneliness? Who is left then
for chanting? How could the rain
come when the dead
rise, dry as graves?
No stomach from black
calf and sheep. No song
for the dollar-bird,
or pool of water
to drown a snake.
Your tongues are dry of prayers,
have no spit for the sky.
But yesterday, when Governor Sonny Purdue prayed for rain on the steps of a courthouse with three protestant ministers and two hundred participants (along with 20 protesters) I thought—the people in the Dust Bowl would say that God isn’t listening. That any god of rain doesn’t reward people who have failed the land. And it is a failure.
And it’s not that I don’t agree with prayer. I do. I’m a practicing Catholic so the tradition is part of the territory. But prayer isn’t going to cut it, unless prayer can get a hurricane to form over Lake Lanier, which is now 17 feet below full.
It’s time for practical solutions, serious regulations, and above all, common sense.
